Memorandum for President Trump on Allies & Partners
Subject: Organizing the World for American Prosperity
Purpose: This memo outlines a new alliance structure to advance America’s qualitative technology advantage in a global technology competition.
Objectives:
- Identify and organize the most capable and secure partners to innovate and develop critical technologies before U.S. rivals.
- Safeguard access to critical technologies that are sensitive for national security.
- Establish broader partnerships to develop and build out safe and secure technology applications to promote shared prosperity.
- Prevent rivals from gaining any technology advantage in this competition.
Background
This Memorandum builds on the previously released Foreign Policy Memorandum, “Reestablishing American Foreign Policy Power and Influence with Technology and Innovation.”[1] The United States and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are locked in a competition to define the future of the global order.[2] This competition is economic, international, military, and ideological. The United States sits at the center of a web of alliances that has shaped how the world has operated since the end of World War II. This alliance network has ensured American security and prosperity by establishing the United States as the preferred military and economic partner for its allies. However, the PRC has been busy, slashing America’s ties to its partners, and entangling them and other unaligned countries in its snares.
Beijing has cultivated relationships across Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Europe, creating economic dependencies in partner nations that increasingly subordinate them to the PRC’s political alignment. While China used to be synonymous with cheap, low-end manufactured goods, the PRC’s massive investments in science and innovation have made it a global leader in critical technology sectors, such as advanced telecommunications networks, advanced batteries, and electric vehicles. Technology now constitutes a major component of its efforts to spread its global influence. In international institutions and standards-setting bodies, the PRC has also been active in promoting its technology standards and priorities, which in practice often serve to undermine American-backed standards or otherwise support authoritarian principles. Taken together, Beijing is working to reshape global standards and policies, to the detriment of U.S. interests.
The PRC is working to bring more partners to its side, and America must step up its global efforts to organize its own allies around a competitive and inspiring vision for this new era of competition.[3] During the Cold War, the United States constructed a network of alliances to address the range of global challenges it faced. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was designed to counter Soviet influence and aggression in Europe. Treaties with allies in Asia, such as Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea, addressed threats in the Indo-Pacific region. These alliances remain vital for the collective security goals for which they were established, particularly in light of the war in Ukraine and the risk of conflict in Asia. However, we are now in an era defined by shifting geopolitical dynamics and the transformative power of emerging technologies, which are reshaping understanding of national security, economic prosperity, and societal cohesion.
The race for technology dominance is also a competition for global influence and power. The United States will need to build a new generation of alliances to manage the technology-driven opportunities and challenges it faces today, and demonstrate that American leadership offers better security and prosperity for its partners than the alternative. America must drive these alliances to achieve a qualitative technology advantage that ensures the future global technology landscape reflects the ideals and principles of freedom and liberty. This requires organizing its most capable partners to reach the pinnacle of innovation in critical technologies, like artificial general intelligence (AGI), before rivals like the PRC can do so; safeguarding access to technologies with the highest consequences for national security, while building broader partnerships around safe and secure technology; and preventing rivals from gaining any technology advantage in this competition.
Such an alliance structure should not be fixed, but should remain flexible to bring in new partners as their capabilities grow and evolve. And for the United States, a related foreign policy priority should be to help its partners move up such a ladder toward higher levels of alliance cooperation, ensuring we have more partners sharing the burden of innovation and bringing in greater resources and capabilities for shared efforts.
The recommendations below frame the contours for a new alliance structure to advance America’s qualitative technology advantage in a global technology competition.
Recommendations
Objective 1: Identify and organize the most capable and secure partners to innovate and develop critical technologies before U.S. rivals.
The United States remains the leading innovation power in the world, but we must not doubt that the PRC is catching up or even has surpassed us in key technology areas.[4] While the United States has the size and scale to innovate on its own, a global technology competition means that being able to leverage partners’ capabilities, resources, and markets can make the difference between winning and losing. Geography and ideological alignment helped determine the structure of alliances during the Cold War. For technology competition, nations’ geography and ideological alignment still matter, but we also will need to map partners’ science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) capabilities, resources, and security practices across the array of critical technologies[5] in order to organize alliance cooperation.
- AGI. Like electrification or the machine age, AGI will be of such fundamental and astounding importance to human civilization that its development must be made a top priority. Even with currently unforeseen innovations, AGI infrastructure will require huge amounts of energy, data centers, computational power, and hardware.[6] The United States has large supplies of all of these, but more will be needed. For example, Japan has more than 20 gigawatts of idle nuclear capacity and Canada has abundant supplies of hydropower and fossil fuels, which could power the data centers and largest computer clusters for the future.[7]
- Advanced networks. Data and network communications remain the foundation of the digital world.[8] Ensuring that future generations of these networks can reliably and securely transmit and receive the enormous amounts of data needed to power the AI future is of great importance. However, this technology is a critically contested area where the PRC has enormous capabilities. In this sector, capabilities are diffused among the United States and its partners, such as Finland, Sweden, the UK, Japan, Korea, and India. Bringing together disparate allies and working cooperatively on public-private partnerships, shared research frameworks, technical standards, and mutual innovation incentives can bolster joint innovation potential far beyond what any individual nation can do on its own.
Objective 2: Safeguard access to critical technologies that are sensitive for national security.
Capabilities, resources, and ideological alignment will be important attributes for America’s tech allies. A general purpose technology like AGI will be so central to national power that U.S. advantages must be protected and guided to positive societal outcomes.[9] For such sensitive technologies, the United States must not only look to organize its most capable partners to innovate and develop them more quickly than its rivals, but must also be mindful about protecting such technologies from broader proliferation. We will need to ensure that partners with the capabilities and resources to help an alliance innovation effort also have strong security protocols.
- A “FVEY” model for the most sensitive technologies. The Five Eyes model can offer lessons in building a new technology alliance structure for cooperation on sensitive technologies. The Five Eyes partnership grew from the informal intelligence exchanges that took place between the Allies throughout World War II. These arrangements were formalized in the early years of the Cold War. Together, the Five Eyes recognized the need for further collaboration and developed additional capabilities to respond to Soviet threats around the world. Just as the Five Eyes produced and protected “TOP SECRET” intelligence, the unauthorized exposure or disclosure of which could cause exceptionally serious damage to national security, a new technology alliance should similarly safeguard the development and use of those technologies with the highest consequences for national security and ensure they do not fall into the wrong hands. This alliance should ensure that, where necessary, those companies from allied nations can operate within the alliance safely, securely, and mutually beneficially.
- From Atoms for Peace to “AGI for Peace.” President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace[10] framework envisioned alliance cooperation on positive uses of nuclear science like energy, medicine, industry, and agricultural applications. In return for countries agreeing not to pursue nuclear weapons development, the United States offered partners peaceful nuclear energy and research technology. In this way, countries aligned with the United States, but that may not have the security capabilities or resources to contribute to the development of the most sensitive technologies, can still benefit from its innovation. Likewise, for AGI, the United States and other more capable allies can develop and provide safeguarded models to less capable allies—models of AGI with guardrails built in or AGI applications that do not expose the underlying model architecture, weights, parameters, etc. For instance, as stronger forms of AGI come online, a low-risk AGI package could involve AI energy efficiency modeling tools that can increase grid efficiency; health and biomedical AI systems that can detect diseases and discover new drugs; AI-accelerated agricultural technologies to boost productivity and optimize farming practices through precision agriculture like monitoring soil health, crop conditions, and weather patterns in real-time; and AI accounting tools to identify anomalies in public spending and procurement processes to help cut bureaucratic bloat. In return, these countries could be asked to collaborate on non-proliferation subjects yet to be determined.
Objective 3: Establish broader partnerships to develop and build out safe and secure technology applications to promote shared prosperity.
With the global competitive landscape as it is, we must be careful not to cede geography, markets, or potential future resources and capabilities to the PRC technology sphere of influence. For example, the Kingdom of Jordan is a major U.S. defense and intelligence partner, and yet, the PRC has positioned itself as its partner in digital development, with Huawei seeking to leverage its digitization advantages for AI integration.[11] Just as the discovery of petroleum and natural gas resources across the Middle East during the 20th century transformed poor desert regions into some of the wealthiest areas in the world, the United States and its allies should be prepared for future shifts in the geography of competition. Building global partnerships and cooperation through U.S. world leading allied innovation ecosystems will be critical for American competitive advantage, national security, and economic prosperity.
- Expand the aperture of cooperation on non-sensitive technologies. Not all technologies will be hyper sensitive with regards to national security implications, and require the degree of safeguarding noted above. A new alliance structure should be adaptable in building cooperation with partners that are ideologically aligned with the alliance, but that may have less stringent security capabilities, to develop non-sensitive technologies—such as agricultural and health tech. Work could also go into connecting such non-sensitive tech ecosystems to collaborative agreements around investments in mining, refining, and export facilities for the critical minerals that enable the underlying emerging technologies. This would promote a more mutually beneficial collaboration with such nations rich in critical minerals, and offer a better alternative to the PRC’s extractive, predatory trade practices.
- Compete for future markets by cooperatively building the tech applications and use cases that partners want. While China and India’s populations will be in decline by 2100, African countries will be experiencing dramatic population growth.[12] Indeed, S&P Global has estimated that emerging markets will be responsible for 65% of global GDP growth by 2035, and nine key emerging markets will rank in the world’s twenty largest economies.[13] The Pacific Islands, Egypt, and others are strategic geographic chokepoints for key technologies like fiber cables. In Latin America, it has been estimated that the region will receive a half a trillion dollar economic boost as a consequence of AI.[14] For such emerging economies and nations, it may not always be the highest end technology systems that will matter for their national interests, but rather the practical applications that can elevate the delivery of essential needs in education, health, and infrastructure. The United States should work with allies to consider who is best placed to lead alliance cooperation with global partners to deepen the tech connections between us and position the alliance for greater engagement in the future. In this way, we can be ready to move future partners up the ladder of alliance cooperation by helping them integrate stronger, American-led or -supported platforms and capabilities.
- Assist countries in integrating this technology. The Alliance should collectively provide technical support, training programs, and capacity-building initiatives to ensure effective adoption and the long-term sustainability of the technologies. Through partnerships with local governments, universities, and private sector stakeholders, the Alliance should work with these countries to create ecosystems that can fully leverage these tools. In some cases it may be necessary to offer resources for infrastructure development—such as cloud computing capabilities or advanced data centers—to ensure that these countries can fully utilize the Alliance’s technologies without dependence on adversarial states. This integration will not only bolster alignment with America interests but also foster resilience and innovation in regions susceptible to PRC influence.
- Establish an allies-only Strategic Competition Bank (SCB) to promote alliance technology. The international institutions established in the post-World War II era sought to integrate global cooperation through inclusions of rivals. This was successful for several decades but, now, it no longer promotes American interests in global security and stability. The United States should look to work with allies to create new institutions that can pool allied financial, technological, and human resources to promote alliance technology/strategic competition priorities, such as secure and resilient digital infrastructure and advancing a shared digital freedom agenda. An SCB could fund initiatives to modernize and secure digital ecosystems and infrastructure in allied and partner nations, ensuring their integration into a global framework resistant to authoritarian influence. By creating a unified funding and strategy mechanism, this initiative will solidify cooperation across tiers and strengthen the Alliance’s technology position in a strategic competition.
Objective 4: Prevent rivals from gaining any technology advantage in this competition.
The dual use nature of many emerging technologies is an inherent aspect of their transformative impact on national security, economic, prosperity, and societal cohesion. In this regard, it will be vital for the United States and its allies to consider how best to ensure that rivals cannot leverage such technologies to threaten shared interests. We cannot stop another nation from investing in its innovation ecosystem or capacity. However, we should certainly look at areas of trade and engagement with rivals where the United States and its allies and partners may unintentionally expose intellectual property and other tech capabilities that can help rivals in their innovation efforts. Other memos in this series discuss new export control regimes to prevent leakage of critical technologies.[15] The United States will need to assess the range of trade and engagement with rivals in critical technology sectors—such as exchange programs in science and technology—to determine the levels of risk from such activities, and develop new arrangements within new tech alliance structures to curtail risky activities across the alliance.[16]
Conclusion
The next four years may be the most transformative that the United States has experienced since the Cold War. If the PRC is to be deterred from moving on Taiwan, if AGI is to be developed in the United States, if the United States is to continue to enjoy the greatest economy in the world, and if the principles of freedom and liberty are to continue to shape the global order, then Washington must build a new structure for organizing its allies and partners for the requirements of global technology competition.
The United States will need to galvanize its allies to drive innovation in the most critical technologies, while also broadening partnerships to build lower-risk, but high-impact applications. New, dynamic, tiered alliance structures will enable America and its partners to pool vital tech capabilities, expand global markets, shape future technology standards in accordance with the principles of freedom, protect shared interests, and promote U.S. geopolitical influence now and in the decades to come. The actions outlined in this memo are imperatives that should be implemented with urgency.
[1] Memos to the President: Foreign Policy, Special Competitive Studies Project (2025).
[2] Mid-Decade Challenges to National Competitiveness, Special Competitive Studies Project (2022).
[3] Vision for Competitiveness: Mid-Decade Opportunities for Strategic Victory, Special Competitive Studies Project (2024).
[4] Welcome to the Arena: Who’s Ahead, Who’s Behind, and Where We Are Headed Next in the U.S.-China Technology Competition, Special Competitive Studies Project(2025); see also Urgent Memo to the President on DeepSeek’s Arrival, Special Competitive Studies Project (2025).
[5] SCSP has identified six technology battlegrounds to be central to building national competitiveness: artificial intelligence, biotechnology, advanced compute and microelectronics, advanced networks, advanced manufacturing, and next-generation energy.
[6] Vision for Competitiveness: Mid-Decade Opportunities for Strategic Victory, Special Competitive Studies Project (2024).
[7] Yuka Obayashi & Katya Golubkova, Japanese Nuclear Power Operator Kansai Elec Restarts Seventh Reactor, Reuters (2023).
[8] National Action Plan for U.S. Leadership in Advanced Networks, Special Competitive Studies Project (2023).
[9] Memos to the President: Artificial General Intelligence, Special Competitive Studies Project (2024).
[10] Atoms for Peace, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library (last accessed 2025).
[11] Huawei Accelerates Jordan’s Digital Transformation Through Engaging Roadshows Across the Country, Huawei (2024).
[12] Global Fertility in 204 Countries and Territories, 1950–2021, With Forecasts to 2100: A Comprehensive Demographic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2021, Lancet (2024).
[13] Jose Perez-Gorozpe, et al., Emerging Markets: A Decisive Decade, S&P Global (2024).
[14] Sizing the Prize: What’s the Real Value of AI for Your Business and How Can You Capitalize?, PWC (2024).
[15] Memos to the President: International Techno-Economic Order, Special Competitive Studies Project (2025).
[16] Intelligence Innovation: Repositioning for Future Technology Competition, Special Competitive Studies Project (2024).